So I answered my own question. Yes, those times include rest.
The set I'm talking about is the pace awareness set written up in the June 2011 H2Open Water magazine:
1000 at 16:30
800 at 12:54
600 at 9:30
400 at 6:12
200 at 3:02
This set presumes to teach you pace awareness. Those times are based on my critical swim speed, basically the same thing as my lactate threshold. My CSS is 1:29/100 (yes, I'm slow. But I'm old too, so I've got that going for me). The non-scientist in me tells people that means that I can swim at a constant pace of 1:29, without crossing into the realm of the anaerobic. (Slipping into the oxygen-deprived world of anaerobic is fine when sprinting to a finish or speeding up to hit a buoy before others, but it is NOT where you want to swim for long distances/times.)
I swam this set the last two Wednesdays. Now, considering both my Timex swim watches (and my POS swimovate, but that's another story) are tango uniform, I've had to do all my timings by pace clock. Not the most accurate method. Anyway, I hit the intervals above just fine for the 1000, 800 and 600. I think I hit the interval for the 400. And once I hit the interval for the 200, but the first time I did not. I had about a 1:30 rest on the 1000s, a little over a minute for the 800s, and less than a minute for the 600s. (Damn, I can't wait til my new Timex arrives.)
I intend on swimming this set every Wednesday for a while. Perhaps sometime in the future I'll add a 1200 at the start. But maybe not. The entire swim including warm-up and cool-down is about an hour, and I swim mid-day on a work-day, so adding another 1200 at 20:12 to that workout might not be a good thing. We'll see.
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